The situation is compounded by the advent of large-scale data warehouses and the explosion of e-commerce. Businesses are now able to amass unprecedented amounts of data about their customers and operations. While this new environment is data- and information-rich, it is knowledge- and results-poor. Attempting to make sense of huge data sets can be a labor-intensive, difficult and often fruitless exercise.
Today, management experts and software vendors regularly promote reporting dashboards, scorecards and reports as the ideal way to monitor business performance. They provide visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) through simple visual graphics such as gauges, charts and tables within a Web browser. Dashboards are appealing because they:
- Present a wide number of different metrics in a single consolidated view.
- Roll up details into high-level summaries.
- Provide intuitive indicators, such as gauges and stoplights, that are instantly understandable (e.g., red bar means problem; green bar means everything is on plan).
In many respects, a reporting dashboard can be likened to a dashboard in an automobile which provides an "at-a-glance view" of the current operational state of the vehicle. Note that each gauge provides an independent indicator of performance: the speedometer tells how fast the vehicle is moving, the tachometer indicates RPMs and the voltmeter is an indicator of charge.
Although the vehicle's dashboard alerts the driver to conditions surrounding the operation of the vehicle, it seldom tells the underlying cause of an abnormal reading. A low-voltage reading, for example, could indicate a bad battery, a bad alternator or some other problem. Some level of exploration is required to determine the actual cause of the abnormal reading in order to make a reasonable decision on the corrective course of action.
In a similar vein, business users need to understand the reasons behind the KPI results displayed in reporting dashboards for decision making.
Most reporting dashboards serve as a launch pad to access the underlying detail. The detail behind a KPI is usually accessed through a hot link to a report. The initial report often contains links to more reports for additional detail that, in turn, may link to even more reports. Cross-tabs/pivot tables/online analytical processing (OLAP), spreadsheets and charts may be leveraged within the reports or as separately linked products/interfaces in the sequence.
The tension comes in trying to navigate from summary to detail and in trying to correlate across the different dimensions and indicators.
Analytical Dashboards
Analytical dashboards represent a new approach to dashboards. Rather than hide the details from the dashboard, an analytical dashboard is capable of representing a vast amount of information all at once. By using business visualization techniques, summaries and details can be selected and correlated on one screen in real time. A single visual interface can be used to empower users to engage in a discovery process with their information, eliminating the need for the user to integrate reports, spreadsheets, charts and other tools.
Analytical dashboards provide the understanding of why KPIs are as they are, what trends are driving them and what really matters. They empower business users to navigate and interpret underlying KPI detail, replacing complex pivot table interfaces and the need to string together "reporting threads" that lack flexibility and present navigational challenges for business users.
Key Features of Analytical Dashboards
Analytical dashboards go significantly beyond current dashboards, charting or OLAP. Key features of analytical dashboards include:
- Big picture and all the details: An analytical dashboard is not just an output report - it's an interactive console. It shows the big picture while also presenting the details. There is no need to transition to another report, slice and dice a cube or perform a database query to access the detail.
- Navigation with one interface: Drill down in traditional reports and graphical front ends tends to be an art that few can master - typically involving layers of KPIs, down through OLAP tables, through to reports to the critical pieces of data. Then, if you don't hit the right piece of data, it's back up, over and down again. An analytical dashboard enables summary-to-detail navigation - all in one interactive interface with the flexibility to navigate "sideways" and take slices at any point in the analysis without having to backtrack.
- Correlation and discovery: The core to analysis is understanding causal relationships across the intersection of multiple variables. Analytical dashboards are unique in their ability to accomplish this from an intuitive graphical interface. They allow the end user to select subsets of multiple dimensions directly from the visualizations in the dashboard and then see the resultant intersection immediately in the same viewing screen. The user is able to compare selected subsets with each other and against the whole - a critical step in determining which path(s) to take to obtain their answer. This unique capability enables a dashboard viewer to perform powerful what-if exploratory analysis without ever leaving the analytical dashboard and discover key insights critical to business decision making.
- More information: Analytical dashboards can display tens of thousands to millions of data elements simultaneously. Details are not lost in the summarization - they are right there in the display.
- Results export: Getting the answer is step one. Exporting it into standard reports or operational systems is step two. Analytical dashboards are designed to facilitate action on insight through the export of results to other systems.
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